Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a book published four or more years ago.  

“THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR” by Hugh Thomas (first published in 1962; revised 1965; revised again 1977 and later)

Very occasionally, a non-fiction book acquires almost legendary status as the definitive work on a particular subject. Such a book may be criticised, have its views modified or denied by later writers on the same subject, and even be regarded as superseded. And yet it will still endure as the book that people have to read if they claim to be informed on the subject it deals with. Such a book is The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas (1931-2017). It was originally published in 1962, when Thomas was only in his early 30s, a remarkable feat given its wealth of detail and depth of research. The first edition ran to over 700 pages. Thomas revised and slightly expanded it in the second edition in 1965, and revised it yet again in 1977, responding to minor criticisms of the first edition and incorporating new evidence. By this time The Spanish Civil War was over 800 pages of text.

Why did this book acquire its canonical status? Literally hundreds of books, in many different languages, had already dealt with the Spanish Civil War before Thomas’s first edition appeared. But almost without exception they were partisan, propagandistic about one side or the other, or romanticised.  Two myths prevailed. Myth One: That a military coup, supported by landowners and the church, fought to overthrow a democratically-elected government which most Spaniards supported. Therefore it was a war of Fascism against liberal democracy and “the people”. Myth Two: That a left-wing revolution was already destroying the Spanish Republic, and therefore the coup was necessary to restore order and bring stability to Spain. Civilisation was pitted against chaos. These simplistic myths dominated the field for the 22 years between the end of the civil war and the publication of The Spanish Civil War. Thomas’s book was the first scholarly and documented attempt to write dispassionately about the war even if, inevitably, his own views and sympathies sometimes intrude.

There is another reason for the enduring importance of Hugh Thomas’s book. Until 1975, Francisco Franco was still dictator of Spain and the only histories of the civil war available in Spain itself were those approved by his regime. Thomas’s book was translated into Spanish by a publishing house in Paris, and sometimes smuggled into Spain. After Franco’s death and a return to parliamentary democracy, the translation became a bestseller in Spain and for many Spanish readers it was the first time they had encountered a detailed, non-partisan history of the war. (There is one small glitch here, however. As has subsequently been pointed out, the translation slightly doctored Thomas’s text to downplay atrocities carried out by the Left.)

I read the 1977 Penguin edition of The Spanish Civil War, and page numbers are cited from that edition. I will not synopsise such a complex work, but will make just a few general points.

Thomas’s sympathies are clearly on the side of the republic, but he does point out its many flaws. He argues that in 1931, when the king abdicated and a republic was declared, it had a very defective constitution, and he notes (pp.74-76) that its framers “blundered” by including strictly anti-clerical clauses which, in effect, meant “Spanish Catholics were forced into having to oppose the constitution of the republic if they wished to criticise its educational policy.” As written, the constitution was bound to antagonise a large part of the population. Further, before the military uprising, in the six months between January and July 1936, there was already a breakdown into violence which the central government did little to curtail. The centre-left government had won power by a slim margin (it was no landslide) and “the Popular Front… seemed both in Madrid and in the provincial capitals, more and more the instrument of the revolutionary socialist Left.” (p.168) By the time the military revolt began, there were already many Spaniards willing to welcome it. This is an obvious fact often ignored in popular histories of the war. It was genuinely a civil war. If millions of Spaniards fervently supported the Republic in 1936, then there were also millions of Spaniards who fervently opposed it. It was not a war of “the people” against a small clique.

Once the war was in progress, the Republicans received almost as much foreign aid and equipment as the Nationalists did. (These terms “Republican” and “Nationalist” are still controversial. Opponents of Franco prefer to call his followers “rebels” or “Fascists”. Supporters of Franco called their enemies “Reds”. I’ll stick with the more neutral terms Republican and Nationalist.) But the Republic was uncoordinated and constantly rent by factional divisions – Luis Companys and the Generalidad of Catalonia really regarded themselves as a separate government from Madrid; and the Basques were aligned with the Republic only because they were fighting for national independence. Basque forces were mainly conservative and Catholic. Meanwhile the Anarchists, Communists and P.O.U.M. (an independent Marxist party) loathed one another; and the Centre-Left Socialists really didn’t know which way to jump. The Socialist premier Prieto tried to be the moderate socialist, but Largo Caballero took over as the radical socialist leader of the masses until the Communists manoeuvred him out of power and replaced him as premier with Juan Negrin, who was more compliant to their wishes. The Communists then flexed their muscles and went to war with both the Anarchists and the P.O.U.M., whose leaders they purged and eliminated in 1937. This was what has accurately been called “the civil war within the civil war”. Throughout all this, the figurehead president of the republic Azana could merely look on wringing his hands at what was happening.

Thomas examines in some detail why the Communists became so influential. Just as Hitler and Mussolini were sending men and materiel to help Franco, so was Stalin ostensibly provisioning the Republic. In fact, apart from promoting the overwhelmingly Communist “International Brigades”, and therefore posing as the defenders of democracy, the Stalinists were very niggardly in what they gave without strings attached. As Thomas says, Stalin “would not permit the republic to lose, even if he would not necessarily help it to win.” (p.339) As Thomas reports, Communists had been insignificant in Spain before 1936. Revolutionary groups in Spain tended to be Anarchist or Syndicalist (Syndicalists basically being insurrectionary anarchists in industrial settings). But once violence broke out, Communists seemed to the middle-classes to be more disciplined and acceptable that the wilder Anarchists. So opportunist middle-class supporters of the Republic swelled the Communist ranks. Perhaps this made for greater military efficiency – those Anarchist communes that prioritised land reform over military defence were the first to be overrun by Franco – but it also meant a freeze on radical revolutionary action and the imposition of Communist discipline.

So much did this alienate Anarchists and independent socialists, that by 1939, Anarchists were willing to join the Republican Colonel Casado when he raised his coup against the Negrin government, in the hope of making terms with Franco. This led to the tragic situation, in Madrid and the little that then remained of the Republic, of Casado’s supporters shooting it out with the Communists, while Nationalist forces waited outside the city for the dust to settle. Then Franco’s forces marched in and proceeded to ruthlessly kill survivors of both factions.

All this highlights one major theme of Hugh Thomas’s narrative – that the various groups of the Left were not unified and this lack of unity was one of the many reasons that the Left lost the war.

In extreme contrast, the forces of the Right were rigidly unified and essentially had a common purpose. In Franco’s camp there were almost as many diverse factions and political groups as there were on the Left. Most of the army, conservative monarchists, most of the Catholic hierarchy, centre-Right parliamentarians, Carlists (a monarchist group promoting an alternative monarch to the dynasty that had ruled Spain), and the one real Fascist group, the Falange. It is sheer laziness that leads pop historians to call all these groups Fascist. Franco’s priority was winning the war and he simply suppressed the different factions. Much to their disgust, the Carlists and the Falange were forced to combine and wear the same uniform, which mixed the Falange’s blue overalls with the Carlists’ distinctive red beret. Franco even imprisoned the Falange leader (Hedilla) when he objected. In effect, Franco, a traditionalist authoritarian, destroyed the Falange in all but its name (see p.461).

Military discipline was severe. Despite his clear and expressed sympathies for the Republic, Thomas cannot help noting that the Nationalist forces were more unified in command, more daring in manoeuvre, in a word, more professional as soldiers than the forces of the Republic were. (Though, be it noted, most of the commanders on the Republican side were also professional soldiers, even if the Republican troops weren’t.) Thomas also notes that the Republic threw away some of the military advantages it had at the beginning of the war. Most of Spain’s navy was in the hands of the Republic, but the government of the Republic failed to use this to block some of the Nationalist supply lines. Thomas calls the navy the Republic’s “white elephant”.

Given that the Communists (and their allies) “froze” the social revolution on one side; and Franco “froze” Carlism and the Falange on the other, Thomas calls the last section of his book “The War of the Counter-Revolutions”. He makes it very clear that the social objectives both sides had sought were submerged as the war continued. Through the blazing-hot Brunete, freezing-cold Teruel, Republican offensives on the Ebro and Nationalist counter-offensives, it became in part a war of attrition. It is evident that as early as late 1937, many Spaniards were sick of the whole thing, and covert, but unsuccessful, peace-feelers were put out by both sides.

And what of the carnage? Despite both sides claiming that the Spanish civil war killed a neat one million people, the total number of deaths seems to have been about half that, somewhere between 500,000 and 550,000, but still a huge toll for a country of about 30 million people. There were heroic stories on both sides (the defence of Madrid on this side; the siege of the Alcazar on that). And quite distinct from the battlefield, there were much-publicised atrocities on both sides (the bombing of Guernica on this side; the massacre of over 2,000 Nationalist prisoners in Madrid on that side). Thomas makes it clear that in the frantic first three months of the war (see pp.264-270), there was nothing to choose between the two sides in terms of the massacres of civilians and non-combatants. His final tally for the whole war suggests that the Nationalists eventually committed about twice as many murders of prisoners and non-combtants as the Republicans did. Later estimates have suggested that the Nationalist toll was even higher than that – about three times as much wanton murder as the Republicans committed. At the same time, Thomas does not hesitate to scrutinise closely some atrocity stories which have proven to be fictitious.

Part of the esteem given to Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War derives from the fact that it was the first scholarly book to attempt to cover the whole war, and not merely some aspect of it. Since then, other general histories of the civil war have been written, such as Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain (2006) and the many books of Paul Preston, including his accounting of atrocities The Spanish Holocaust (reviewed on this blog). (Perhaps it would also be pertinent to look up on this blog the review of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life. The review  gives an account of his death in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War.)

I’ll close with a few comments on Hugh Thomas himself. Cambridge-educated, and a prolific historian especially on all periods of Spanish history (he wrote a 1,000-plus page history of the Spanish Empire), he began as a man of the  Centre-Left and a member of the Labour party. But over the years his politics moved more to the right. For a short while he sided with the Conservative Party, but in his last years was a Liberal Democrat. He was eventually granted a peerage. He received many medals and awards, including some from the (post-Franco) Spanish government, in honour of his work in history. I came across one “review” (one of those brief, semi-literate statements by readers that appear on Amazon book sites) which claimed that Thomas was given a medal by the Francoist regime. This is patently untrue. Thomas’s work was banned in Franco’s Spain and, when it came to the topic of the Spanish Civil War, Thomas’s sympathies remained on the Centre-Left.